AT THE END OF THE century the American avant-garde cinema is flourishing, despite two decades dominated by anxious discussions of crises.1 All during that time many of the strongest filmmakers of the forties, fifties, and sixties continued to produce major films, unaffected by the tides of ideological debate, while other, younger artists were energized by the issues the older generation sidestepped. In the end, every apparently massive reorientation of direction and style culminated in a reaffirmation of the fundamental continuity of genres and themes that have shaped this cinema since the Second World War.
By the late seventies and throughout most of the eighties a convergence of social and aesthetic forces suggested that a dramatic shift might be at stake. Theoretical authority had passed from the poetics of film-makers writing about their art (essentially a succession from Deren to Brakhage and Mekas, and then to Frampton and Kubelka) to academic critics under the influence of Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan; the paradigm of modernist, or even high art, cinema was under assault; feminism became the single most dynamic arena of energy generating both new films and critical discussions; the exchange of ideas and exhibitions between America, Europe, and Asia led to an international style in avant-garde film-making. The consequences of these developments can still be felt, but in the long run, the avant-garde cinema was less profoundly affected than many other domains, even though film-makers’ poetics remains in eclipse, at least as many women as men are numbered among the prominent working film-makers, and mass culture plays a considerable part in the intertextual references of many of the influential films of the past two decades.
A tendency toward international distribution, and to a lesser degree production, has actually strengthened the various national traditions within the avant-garde cinema. A brief push for feature-length, narrative films failed, yet again, to open an avenue toward wider commercial acceptance, revealing the surprising strength of film-makers clinging to the poverty of 8mm, or silent, or black and white, or hand-painted and scratched films.
The deaths of older, and some younger, film-makers seems to have altered the historical picture as much as, if not more than, the theoretical and ideological revolutions: Hollis Frampton (1984), Andy Warhol (1987), Jack Smith (1988), Harry Smith (1991), Gregory Markopoulos (1992), Marjorie Keller (1993), Paul Sharits (1993), Warren Sonbert (1995), Joyce Weiland (1998), James Broughton (1999), and Sidney Peterson (2000). Keller, Sonbert, and Frampton, who had been regularly producing influential and powerful films, died at the height of their powers; Frampton was in the midst of a vast serial epic, Magellan. In the cases of Warhol, Jack Smith, and Markopoulos, films which they had removed from distribution for nearly twenty years began to reappear posthumously in the nineties with renewed force.
Quiescent film-makers Peter Kubelka and Bruce Conner have had their greatest influence during this time. Kubelka’s lecture tours, expounding the power of the “synch-event,” has helped to form the consciousness of sound possibilities for a new generation of film-makers. That generation has massively followed Conner (and Joseph Cornell) in mining stock footage and old films for the raw materials of their works. They are film-makers who began to exhibit in the nineties, bringing with them an audience for avant-garde cinema larger and more enthusiastic than any we have seen since the early seventies. Their work is so protean and diverse that it cannot be encompassed in this chapter.2
WITHIN THE HISTORICAL MORPHOLOGY OF the American avant-garde cinema the Menippean satire (or Menippea) gradually became the dominant new genre. A dialogue of forms and voices, open to narrative elaborations but not requiring them, in which characters embody ideas rather than manifest complex psychologies, the Menippea became the favorite genre of “postmodernists” internationally. Its roots are to be found in ancient Greece and its revival is by no means limited to postmodernism. All the ideas proposed in a Menippean satire are subject to irony; the very concept of a philosophical resolution becomes an occasion for parody. Fantasy and realism alternate or even coincide, more often than not with a concatenation of styles and perspectives. The Menippea frequently incorporates other genres and films-within-films.
In the American avant-garde cinema Sidney Peterson had fused the Menippea with the trance film in the late forties. Nelson’s and Wiley’s The Great Blondino, Rice’s The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man, Jonas Mekas’s Guns of the Trees, and Landow’s Wide Angle Saxon and On the Marriage Broker Joke … are Menippean satires. Michael Snow had even acknowledged these generic affiliations by naming his encyclopedic work of 1975 after Diderot’s great example of the genre, Rameau’s Nephew.
Yvonne Rainer, the only major American film-maker whose work is entirely in this genre, has frequently cited Godard as her source of inspiration; indeed, Godard’s most influential films are Menippean satires. In a sense, her version of the Menippea, fully matured after Kristina Talking Pictures (1976), was born in reconciliation of the contradictory interaction of Godard and the principles of Laura Mulvey’s influential essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975). Rainer’s influence and that of her films has been enormous, especially on the work of younger women filmmakers, who have generally found a path between her European elective affiliations and the native avant-garde traditions.
The grand serial projects of Hollis Frampton, Hapax Legomena and the unfinished Magellan, were Menippea as well. That distinguishes them formally from Brakhage’s mythopoeic and autobiographical epics. Their dialogical structure was a defense against the engulfing subjectivity at the heart of Brakhage’s cinema, which Brakhage himself intuited when, amidst the most severe crisis of his career, he made his own Menippean satire, the Faust series (1987–1989). It was in this spirit that Frampton had in 1972 ironically proposed “Brakhage’s Theorem:
For any finite series of shots [‘film’] whatsoever there exists in real time a rational narrative, such that every term in the series, together with its position, duration, partition and reference, shall be perfectly and entirely accounted for.3
In 1981 the feminist theorist Teresa De Lauretis, critically analyzing Snow’s Presents, unwittingly echoed Frampton’s formulation with a straight face:
As my reading of Presents suggests, the production of meaning and, thus, the engagement of subjectivity in the process of seeing and hearing a film are never wholly outside of narrative … [Narrative] is a condition of signification and identification processes, and the very possibility of “seeing” is dependent on it. That Snow’s recent work comes back to a referential and representational (“thematic”) content … may evidence an awareness of this insistence of narrativity in imagistic meaning and of the tendency to narrativize at work in perception itself.4
REFLECTIONS ON THE STATUS OF NARRAtive frequently occur within the filmic Menippea of the avant-garde. James Benning’s Grand Opera (1978) is by no means his most successful film despite brilliantly defining the genre in which it and all Benning’s subsequent films participate. The film itself is a self-conscious effort to overcome the impasse the film-maker felt in making structural films, albeit with interwoven narratives; it implicitly defines the generic heritage of the Menippean satire by including “talking heads” of Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton, George Landow, and Yvonne Rainer.5 What they had in common at that time was having recently attempted to renew their work by shifting to Menippea; the three men were moving away from the largely monomorphic films I had characterized as structural cinema, and Rainer was finding her voice in cinema after turning from choreography, where her early minimalism had already evolved into complex multivoiced dances. In friendly opposition to Brakhage, whose denigrating definition of sound film as “grand opera” gave him his title, Benning boldly constructed the film to inscribe himself into the main tradition of the American avant-garde cinema, and in doing so embraced the genre in which he would work for at least twenty years.
I shall consider one of his recent elaborations of the genre. Four Corners (1997) explores the fate of the Anasazi Indians and the subsequent inhabitants of the American Southwest in the area where Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah meet. The interlacing of autonomous biographical sketches, indirect autobiography, paintings, and landscape studies recalls the modernist Menippea of John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. with its collage of biographies, autobiographical stream of consciousness (“The Camera Eye”) and fugal assembly of tangentially related narratives. Dos Passos fractured the components of his massive novel to suggest that each element was a synecdoche for the relentless violence and exploitation at the core of American life.6
Benning’s indictment of genocide and racism, and his tragic view of eros and artistic expression, does not aspire to the epic scale of U.S.A., three novels that span the first thirty years of the twentieth century. Instead, it hovers around the degradation of Navajo life in the Four Corners region with far-flung references to the racism of Socialist Milwaukee where Benning grew up, Monet’s Paris and Giverny, Jasper Johns’s childhood in Georgia, the life of the naive painter Moses Tolliver in Alabama, and an imagined biography of Yukawa, a woman who, Benning fancies, painted visionary petroglyphs in the Four Corners region fourteen hundred years before the first Europeans arrived.
Scrolling texts present thumbnail lives of Monet, Tolliver, Yukawa, and Johns, each culminating in the dramatic genesis of a painting shown in the film. Longer voice-over narratives tell (a) the story of Richard Wetherill who discovered Mesa Verde and eventually died when a Navajo shot him, (b) the history of Milwaukee and of the neighborhood where Benning lived, (c) the history of Indian migration to Chaco Canyon and their subsequent domination by Spaniards and Americans, and (d) the story of the murder of Benji Benally, an educated Navajo who took to drink when he could not find work. The three white teenagers who killed him and two other Navajos served less than two years in a reformatory.
Benning’s camera is predominantly static, coolly contemplating nearly desolate landscapes, archeological sites, slums, and factory exteriors. We see Chaco Canyon in summer, a slum corner with few people stirring in Milwaukee in the autumn, the Mesa Verde ruins in the snow, a sordid spring in Farmington, New Mexico where Benally died: a liquor store, vagrant Indians, alleyways, a housing project for Navajos, their barren graveyard, and a church. In twenty-five years Benning has performed a radical ascesis of the witty, vibrant formal compositions which together with startling sound juxtapositions characterized his 8 ½ × 11 (1974), 11 × 14 (1976), and One Way Boogie Woogie (1977), the three films that first commanded critical attention, identifying him as one of the most original film-makers of his generation.
In 1989 Brakhage had also filmed Mesa Verde—the chief Anasazi site—in Faust 4, the last section of his own excursion into Menippean satire, the “Faust” series (1987–1989). He used footage from that visit more extensively for the second of his four-part Visions in Meditation (1989). In that section he also used quotations from Walter G. Chase’s filmed records of epileptic seizures (1905), found in the Paper Print Collection of the Library of Congress (earlier a source for Jacobs, Frampton, and others in quest of images of origination in American film history), collapsing the origins of the American documentary into his vision of the shamanistic haunting of the abandoned site.
Brakhage began the eighties with two related series of silent “abstract” films—modulations of color and light without identifiable imagery—The Roman Numeral Series (1979–1981), nine films “which explore the possibilities of making equivalents of ‘moving visual thinking’, that pre-language, pre-‘picture’ realm of the mind which provides the physical grounds for image making (imagination), thus the very substance of the birth of imagery,” and The Arabic Numeral Series (1980–1982), nineteen “abstract” films “formed by the intrinsic grammar of the most inner (perhaps prenatal) structure of thought itself.”
However, most of his energetic output of films in the eighties refracted the prolonged crisis culminating in the end of his marriage to Jane Collum in which he had been so invested as an artist and polemicist. The key films representing aspects of that agony would be Tortured Dust (1984), a four-part film of sexual tensions surrounding life at home with his two teenage sons, Confession (1986), depicting a love affair near the end of his marriage (1987), and the Faust series (1987–1989), his Menippean satire in four autonomous sound films reinterpreting the legend that obsessed Brakhage throughout his career.
The first two sections of the Faust series, Faustfilm: An Opera and Faust’s Other: An Idyll, are psycho-dramas recalling the film-maker’s Flesh of Morning and Cat’s Cradle respectively. In them he reaches beyond his own earlier achievements to seek renewal from the latent energies of his senior contemporaries; the first has ostensible debts to Peterson’s Mr. Frenhofer and the Minotaur, and the second to Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. The third in the series, Faust 3: Candida Albacore, clearly a collaboration with a group of younger performers, continues to mine Peterson’s film for inspiration and calls upon the Peterson–Broughton collaboration, The Potted Psalm as well. In Faust 4 Brakhage breaks loose from the restrictive, almost crippling regression to psycho-drama (and the pitfalls of collaboration) by shifting genre to the moving vehicle lyric, a form Brakhage had seized and perfected as one of his initial filmic signatures. With the camera in his car he travels and shoots in Kansas, Texas, and at Mesa Verde, which he intercut with short images of his Faust and his “Other.”
The Faust films are occasions for the film-maker to return to the scenes of his aesthetic origins and his artistic growth. The equivocal distance he must establish in order to keep elements of nostalgia, erotic desperation, and exorcism from overwhelming the project required a version of Menippean satire. Brakhage’s inheritance of Menippea comes directly from Peterson, unlike Benning’s more elaborate tradition stemming from Frampton, Snow, Landow, and above all Rainer (and through her Godard). The title of the first part of the Faust series apparently reiterates the analogy that Benning ironized: the fusion of sound and image, language and picture as “opera.” His discomfort with the ironies of the genre is evident in the first three parts. He has said:
By part 4 I had to work my way out because I knew by then that I had to free myself from psychodrama, and from the dramatics of Faust itself, and inherit the landscape again. Part 4 is the obliteration by single frame of the memories of the past in the swell of the earth and in the desert. Also, by this time, I had met and fallen in love with Marilyn [Jull, whom he married shortly afterwards], and the film resulted from a road trip we took during which I photographed the landscapes of the west and the midwest. So in Part 4 there is no story really—but a going to the desert to rid myself of these “pictures” and encompass the whole spectrum of sky and earth and what lies between the two.7
The willful “obliteration of the memories of the past” leads him to Mesa Verde. The uncanny intuition of horror that he claims to have experienced at the site remained with him and found expression in the second of his Visions in Meditation.
In Benning’s Four Corners the ruins of Mesa Verde are lonely, almost deserted vestiges of a civilization destroyed by European and American imperialism, fragments of a utopia allegorized by the fiction of Yukawa who “on her nineteenth birthday … achieved the holy right to mark the canyon walls” with visionary paintings. He attributes the abandonment of Mesa Verde to “a severe decline in summer rains,” rather than the occult intimation of a horrible event Brakhage suggests, or cannibalism, the thesis of Christy Turner ll.8
THE PROTOTYPE OF BENNING’S MENIPPEA would be Yvonne Rainer’s Journeys from Berlin/1971 (1980); I am selecting her strongest film for illustration, although almost any of her films would serve in a discussion of almost any of Benning’s. In Journeys from Berlin/1971 she fused together readings from her adolescent diary, fictional psychoanalytical sessions—film scholar Annette Michelson plays the analysand—an art world conversation largely about Ulrike Meinhof spoken by film critic Amy Taubin and performance artist Vito Acconci, and a crawling text of political events, especially repression, in West Germany between 1950 and 1997. The images show the psychoanalytic session from highly stylized angles corresponding to the alternation of the analysts played by a man and a boy. The objects on his desk often change. There is also a slow pan of a mantlepiece with often incongruous objects relating to the art world conversation which is otherwise never visualized. Figures move in a mannered way before a modern Berlin church; one woman gives another a recorder lesson. But above all, the aerial images of Stonehenge and the Berlin Wall have a relevance to the use of Mesa Verde in Benning’s film.
Stonehenge had been a focus of fascination for a generation of American sculptors in the 1960s, when Rainer, then a dancer and choreographer, was living with the sculptor Robert Morris. Gerald S. Hawkins’s Stonehenge Decoded (1965) had been widely read at the time. In Journeys from Berlin/1971 the symbolic equation of Stonehenge with the Berlin Wall implies that the ruin, misidentified in legend as a Druidic temple and sacrificial center, may be another monument to cruelty and repression. Such is the penultimate irony of Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles when the exhausted heroine wakes up on the so-called altar stone of Stonehenge, as if she were its sacrificial victim.
The influence of Hawkins’s interpretation of Stonehenge as an observatory of solar and lunar phenomena can be glimpsed in the note Hollis Frampton provided for his Hapax Legomena: Ordinary Matter (1972):
A vision of a journey, during which the eye of the mind drives headlong through Salisbury Cloister (a monument to enclosure), Brooklyn Bridge (a monument to connection), Stonehenge (a monument to the intercourse between consciousness and LIGHT) … visiting along the way meadows, barns, waters where I now live; and ending in the remembered cornfields of my childhood. The soundtrack annexes, as mantram, the Wade-Giles syllabary of the Chinese language.9
Symbolic objects on the mantelpiece in Yvonne Rainer’s Journeys from Berlin/1971 and the fusion of scratched words and gymnasium images in Su Friedrich’s Gently Down the Stream.
The moving camera uniting the architectural and natural sites, the fusion of personal, autobiographical (the Chinese syllabary obliquely refers to Frampton’s emulation of his mentor, Ezra Pound), and world-historical allusions are typical of the American avant-garde cinema’s appropriation of Menippean satire. Ordinary Matter is a reprise, transferred to hyperbole, of the film that first drew attention to the film-maker, Surface Tension (1968), which included a fast-motion crossing of the Brooklyn Bridge and a commentary in German.
Frampton’s Stonehenge has neither political or magical overtones: it is an enduring “monument” to aesthetic purity, rational thought, and breathtaking engineering. In Frampton’s hands the rhythmic enjambment of sites, historical periods, and architectural uses serves to divest each element of its religious, ritual, or practical function. Conversely, Kenneth Anger’s only widely released film since 1972, Lucifer Rising (1980), uses a megalithic temple (not Stonehenge) and a number of ancient Egyptian sites in a Crowleyan ritual hymn to chthonian and ouranian deities of power and light. The cutting among sacred locations eschews the detachment of comparative mythology in favor of an eclectic ceremonial paganism, fulfilling an aspiration expressed by Maya Deren in the late forties.
The coincidence of these evocations of ancient vestiges of lost, and to varying degrees enigmatic, monuments can help us define the nature and range of the Menippean satire as a genre of avant-garde cinema. To begin with the negative instance, Lucifer Rising is a ritual hymn; it uses the ruins of temples to retrieve the immanent mystery and power the film-maker-magus felt at those places. They are not, as in the other examples from Benning, Brakhage, Rainer, and Frampton, woven into a dialogic text that problematizes their meaning.
The strictest example of the Menippea among these would be Rainer’s film. There she undercuts the imagistic sublimity of Stonehenge early in the film with the metaphor of the Berlin Wall. Above all, it is Rainer’s use of language that gives the moving aerial shots of Stonehenge so complex a resonance.10 She keys those shots to the reading of excerpts from the diary of her teenage years, documenting a preoccupation with social justice and an intense resistance to both emotional manipulation—from songs, movies—and adolescent narcissism.
Similarly, Benning elaborates his versions of the Menippean satire primarily through the suggestive strings of aporias he fashions from images of nearly deserted places, joined to printed and spoken texts. But Frampton and Brakhage build their more tentative Menippeas out of the serial linking of autonomous units, mostly short structural and lyrical films. Hapax Legomena uses a different linguistic strategy in four of its seven parts: the Chinese of Ordinary Matter is the most minimal and obscure; I described the ironical autobiographical narrative of (nostalgia) in the previous chapter; in Critical Mass a young couple’s fierce argument is reorganized as a fugue; and in Poetic Justice we read, a page at a time, the scenario of a phantasmagoria involving “I”, “you,” and “your lover.” In the Faust series the use of language is concentrated in short voice-over narrations written and spoken by the film-maker in all but the third part; in the first two there are fragmentary snatches of dialogue as well. On the other hand, Visions in Meditation is a series of travel lyrics with no generic or formal dissonance among them; it has no voice-over; insofar as it posits a dramatic persona, it is the same questing and observing self in all four parts: so, it is not a Menippean satire.
The Menippea is particularly suited to the testing of ideas. Its peculiar florescence in the late seventies and its remarkable continuity for two decades reflects a general crisis in high culture and a particular one within the American avant-garde cinema. The more general issue has usually been discussed as “postmodernism” and includes a rejection of distinctions been high and mass culture, an iconoclasm of artistic authority, relentless politicization of all themes, and an insatiable desire to unmask ideology. In such a climate Menippean satire flourishes among literary genres. Internationally the cinema has responded with its own versions of Menippea: Godard, Greenaway, even Woody Allen have made it their signature genre. But it is far from an artifact of postmodernism, merely a preferred element of the tradition.
In the more confined theater of the American avant-garde cinema, the revival of Menippean satire was a response to the crisis brought about as film-makers came to feel the exhaustion of structural cinema. It was natural, then, that the reaction should come from within: Landow, Snow, and Frampton made Menippea that addressed the ideational matrix of structural cinema so that it seemed, at the time, that their new forms were fundamentally a development and extension of structural cinema. However, Rainer, entering film-making from dance, at first collaborating with Babette Mangolte, a French camerawoman with aesthetic affiliation to the work of Godard, brought a political vision and infectious vigor to the Menippean satire. Benning, who began making films with strong allegiances to structural cinema, while desiring to find a place for both narrative and political criticism in his work, found himself uniquely situated to profit from Rainer’s example.
Brakhage’s excursion into Menippea was another matter. The marriage which had been the focus of so much of his film-making dissolved, and at the same time structural cinema virtually disappeared, depriving him of the aesthetic nemesis that had fructified his oppositional polemics and practice. In the ensuing personal crisis he turned back to the psychodrama where his work originated, to the ideational genre of his elective mentor, Sidney Peterson, and to a desperate collaboration with young admirers. He emerged from that single excursion into Menippean satire purged of those demons and committed to a prolific outpouring of new films, most of them hand-painted but including photographed lyrics of the highest order.
RAINER’S PROMINENCE AS AN AVANT-GRADE choreographer accelerated her recognition as film-maker, and her feminism, her Godardlike pastiche of quotations and allusions (often to the heroes of the Left and to European theoreticians) gave her immediately a heroic stature that younger women film-makers with the same intellectual orientation earned more slowly. That younger generation, represented by Su Friedrich, Leslie Thornton, and Abigail Child, among many others, have transferred the themes and even some of the cinematic rhetoric of Rainer’s films, shorn of her debts to Godard and even Bergman, to the native tradition of the lyrical-compensatory film, bringing about the most significant renewal of energies within the avant-garde cinema of the 1980s, by challenging the male dominated subgenres: autobiography, serial epics, dream journals.
Two years after she started making films, Su Friedrich scratched her dream journal onto leader and images of a woman exercising: Gently Down the Stream (1981). With an optical printer she manipulated the rhythms of the scratched words, otherwise reminiscent of Brakhage’s titles, which he may have derived from Larry Jordan’s film Man Is in Pain (1955). By the 1980s, access to optical printers was widespread among avant-garde film-makers. These machines, which permitted the artist to rephotograph previously processed strips of film at different speeds, forwards or backwards, and to enlarge or mask-out parts of the image, began to appear in institutional film-making departments in the late 1970s and were even privately owned (sometimes homemade) by a few film-makers in the 1980s.
Friedrich uses the optical printer minimally to slow down the flickering words, freeze the surf on a beach, or isolate the image of a woman exercising in a gymnasium on part of the screen, leaving the rest as a black background for her writing. The extraordinary force of the film comes directly from the well-timed progression of the pared-down text which captures the mystery and terror of dreams, even more vividly than Frampton’s verbal phantasmagoria, Hapax Legomena: Poetic Justice, to which it owes a debt comparable to that to Brakhage. Yet, what is most remarkable about Friedrich’s pulsing words is the way they invest the film’s scanty and casual black and white images with strange power and beauty.
Some early, jumpy shots of plaster saints prepare the first of several controlling metaphors when we read “walk / into / church / my / mother / trembles / trances / reciting / a / prayer / about / orgasm.” The subsequent images of a woman on a rowing machine and another swimming in a pool suggest that exercise has become a substitute for prayer, the gymnasium an ersatz church. Sexual imagery and animal violence dominate the rest of the text. The drama progresses from intimations of primal scenes in church and on a stage in which the etching poet is a witness to surprising acts of erotic possession: “I make a second vagina … I draw a man, take his skin, inflate it, get excited, mount it…I lie in the gutter giving birth to myself…”
Su Friedrich does give birth to herself as a major film-maker in this fourteen-minute silent film. As the imagery moves from the gymnasium pool to the ocean shore and the open sea, the power of language and song become the theme of the dream poem. She hears a chorus of five women spelling out “the word for truth in German but she spells “B-L-I-N-D-N-E-S-S.’ “She rejects the oneiric suggestion that the women sing “a very clever pun” in her mother’s native language, implying in her rejection that the price of an abstract, theoretical truth is blindness by scratching the letters over swiftly moving images of light sparkling on the sea. Then, when she dreams that “a leopard eats two blue hummingbirds” she feels in a phonetic and syntactic eruption the “er / utter / mutter / flutter” of the feathers “humming” on her “bones / hearts / tongue.”
Late in the film, the fin of a large sea creature can be seen in the water, as if she were filming from a whale watch excursion. Although it rhymes visually with the woman we had earlier seen swimming in the gymnasium, it also charts the evolution of the imagery from the figure who commands her erotic fascination to the Dionysian emblem of her own poetic incarnation; for the dolphin and the leopard are the bestial companions of the god of wine and inspired drama.
She avoided the Menippea of the period of her coming to maturity as a film-maker: her films represent a free movement amid avant-garde and narrative genres: collage, psycho-drama, autobiography, portrait. Her critical and analytical portraits of her mother (The Ties that Bind [1984]) and her father (Sink or Swim [1990]) are her most powerful films. The latter owes something to Frampton’s use of alphabetical models in Zorns Lemma. Like several of the best film-makers of her generation, Friedrich deals explicitly with lesbian issues, making us aware of the earlier neglect of this passion, even in a tradition that has been remarkably daring in its bold treatment of male homosexuality.
ABIGAIL CHILD TOO TRACES HER INHERItance through Brakhage and Frampton:
I’ve also learned great amounts from Stan Brakhage and Hollis Frampton, through their liberating ideas about film: that you didn’t need plot, that anything can be used, their sense of the visual nature of the medium, of all the areas which had not been tried. Frampton was using words, which was especially appealing to me, a modern poetry of images. You could say sugar, for example, and film black, take things of different kinds, in surprising or unstable relations, and let that direct your process.11
Child intimates here that the theoretical stances of Brakhage and Frampton, even more than any of their films, influenced her. In “Film in the House of the Word,” Frampton rejected Brakhage’s claim that the suppression of naming leads to a recovery of vision. To the opening question of Metaphors on Vision: “How many colors are there in a field of grass for a crawling baby unaware of ‘green,’”12 he answered that the child would see no colors without language. He argued,
Every artistic dialogue that concludes in a decision to ostracize the word is disingenuous to the degree that it succeeds in concealing from itself its fear of the word…and the source of that fear: that language in every culture, before it becomes an arena of discourse, is, above all, an expanding arena of power, claiming for itself and its wielders all it can seize, and relinquishing nothing.13
Brakhage had theorized the primacy of visual experience in film as a reclamation of preverbal seeing. Frampton’s most influential, and liberatory gesture, was to validate language as both a structural model and privileged topic for avant-garde cinema. For Child, and many film-makers of her generation, the theoretical passions had shifted to the arena of gender (sometimes of social class and race as well), so she could claim as her inheritance both Brakhage’s metaphor of cinema as vision and Frampton’s linguistic preoccupations. Crucially, she and her contemporaries were guided by Brakhage’s insistence that the film-maker should build a film out of what he or she sees on the developed filmstrip with all its “errors” and imperfections, rather than a preconceived imaginary image which the film-maker attempts to capture in successive ‘takes.’
The serial structures of Child’s Is This What You Were Born For?[1981–1987 in six parts: Prefaces, Both, Mutiny, Covert Action, Perils, Mayhem, Mercy] and Leslie Thornton’s Peggy and Fred in Hell [1984–1992, continuing in six parts, two 16mm film, three video, one simultaneous projection of film and video] derive from Brakhage’s Dog Star Man, even though the former strongly repudiates Brakhage’s edenic sexuality and the latter his idealization of the child as a model of the visionary.
Child’s urban Menippea offers no moment of pure origin: consciousness is embedded from its beginning in an intersubjective welter of codified gestures, dissonant sounds, and inherited genres of representation and emulation. Thornton, on the other hand, situates her isolated siblings “making their way through a post-apocalyptic landscape…not a sensible world, a horrible world, limiting, blind, stupid, arrogant, like any culture.”14
A FRAGMENTARY GLIMPSE OF THE ISSUES AT stake, especially for women film-makers, in this period can be had in the correspondence between Abigail Child and Marjorie Keller in 1989.
Keller, preparing an article on Child’s Mayhem, writes:
I am assuming that the split in the film into its dramatic and pornographic elements was the overriding design decision of the film and that somehow that split allowed you to bridge a fissure you saw as otherwise unresolvable…. In my own films, especially Misconception, partitioning off segments of events (or event if that’s how you see childbirth) was the only way I could deal with the enormity of what I was representing. It allowed for a step back and a new point of view in my consideration of documentary form. So then, I ask myself, what is that fissure? In terms of the whole project of Is This What You Were Born For? (which as I see it is the rewriting of American film history in your own terms with, loosely, Prefaces as documentary, Mutiny as musical/dance extravaganza, Covert Action as home movie, Perils as American silent film melodrama. Mayhem spans both film noir and narrative pornography. And so the manifest split is there in trying to rework two separate genres in one film. But my gut feeling is that there is a latent dichotomy that you are driving at that can only be gotten to by a kind of stereo vision.) …I see it as trying to reconcile what I will, for lack of a better term, call the lyricism of your earlier film style and roots, with the recent demands on women filmmakers prescribing sexual politics as the subject of every film. What those politics are are ambiguous to me (and I place positive value on that), but I venture to say they have something to do with switching roles (in the first part) and asserting women’s pleasure in watching the watcher (in the second half). Both of these loom large in feminist film theory no matter whether you trace it from Peter Gidal’s refusal to include women in his films in the early ’70s, or from Laura Mulvey’s doomed and dooming essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”
Now, what the sexual politics don’t seem to be about is the avant garde tradition. Again, it’s a result of reading beneath the surface references of the film because, on the surface, Mayhem can be seen as a kind of compilation of 3 avant garde dinosaurs: Flaming Creatures in it sultry menages, Snow’s Presents in its structural split and film referentiality, and Brakhage’s Loving in its voyeurism and joi [sic] d’amour. And all three of these films have been accused of sexism and obscenity by critics of diverse persuasions.…I’m sure you read and heard some of the stuff. The most egregious is in Teresa De Lauretis’ Alice Doesn’t, where she takes Snow to task for not allowing women space in his film except as objects of his lurid camera eye. Not even as film viewers, as if we were somehow excluded by the very sight of a naked female.
…It seems to me that Mayhem is particularly timely in countering the recent puritanical tide against sex in film that has resulted from feminists as diverse as the Women Against Pornography group and Yvonne Rainer. This seems to cast you back again with the older avant garde tradition (including Schneemann) that portrayed, without a blush, women and men in the act(s).… What pressed you to be so unabashed in flatly presenting found porn and how do you respond when that part of Mayhem is attacked?
Child responded:
There in no grand split as I see it. Noir is latently pornographic. The pornographic is about seduction. And in this particular piece—shaken, broken, as it is, there is an archetypal fiction complete with parallel editing (as in Griffith), a garden (of Eden), and the stolen pearl (of beauty). The voyeur becomes us, as I intercut the story that had come before, intercut, indite, corrupt. …The fissure you imagine you imagine.…It is not a “manifest split” but a construction. I did feel the need to uncover and the footage that came my way while I was futilely trying to create that was a perfect image of the model narrative, which was my concern to begin with.
You are close perhaps in your reading of BORN FOR? though I see PREFACES as a sound ORNAMENTALS, encyclopedic and MUTINY as the perverse/reversed documentary. MAYHEM is a homage to Noir and makes surface what is latent in the Noir, in the feature suspense. hung on promises of flesh and violence.…
MAYHEM is a continuation of my concerns, not some magnum break. This is why MAYHEM should be shown with COVERT ACTION and PERILS. It gains context and authenticity. In both content and form. I am analyzing coded gestures. I am choreographing the body. I am using sound as the lead—a different process shape from the other parts of BORN FOR?
Switching roles and women’s pleasure are for me throughout the film.
I am thoroughly responsible for my images. Through gender mixes, multiple ‘leads’, graphic design, undertow on the forward motion (of the plot) and sound example I try to keep conscious. In editing I found one heroine discovered her pursuers were kissing. I realized: we fear what we desire, we desire what we fear. The way could open out. My conclusion could enter (actually penultimate conclusion). Something could go awry in the plan of constant chase or women as devil doll (the Hollywood manifestation). The titles return to frame this ‘pastoral’.…
“What pressed you to be so unabashed” Why not? One of my intentions was to embarrass myself, though in all honesty I did not since somewhere towards the close of the editing, I realized the question(s) were/are different, that I had answered whatever questions—of light and film and search and love—I had wanted to know. The process has revised the issue.
This exchange looks back to Carolee Schneemann’s Fuses (1964–1968), an erotic lyric in Brakhage’s manner—hand-held camera, super-impositions, enacted by the film-maker and her lover, James Tenney.15 Feminist film-makers of the seventies and eighties called attention to the remarkable candor and energy of Fuses and especially to its celebration of female desire. It also anticipates the explicit sexuality of a film such as Peggy Awesh’s and Keith Sanborn’s The Deadman (1989), an adaption of Georges Bataille’s short story in which a young woman leaves the corpse of her dead lover to exhibit herself and fornicate recklessly in a tavern.
THE LYRIC GENRE JONAS MEKAS FIRST identified and heralded as the diary film has been misnamed. Even his own continuing great work, Diaries, Notes, and Sketches, which he began with Walden and has continued through at least nine subsequent films,16 is not precisely a diary, if we define that genre as a chronological sequence of dated passages. The three categories, diaries, notes, and sketches, share a negative relation to lapidary, fully constructed and finished achievements; they are quotidian lyrics, spontaneous, perhaps tentative, records of a sensibility in the midst of, or fresh from, experience. Some artists encouraged the diary metaphor by their titles: Peter Hutton’s Images of Asian Music (A Diary from Life 1973–74); most of Howard Guttenplan’s films, for example, European Diary ’79 (Criss-Crossings) (1979); several of Robert Huot’s films, e.g. Diary 1974–75 (1974–1978). However, many of the film-makers Mekas designated as diarists have been quick to repudiate the label.
Andrew Noren:
I never thought of it [The Adventures of the Exquisite Corpse, Part One: Huge Pupils] as “diary”; in fact, I doubt if I was consciously thinking in terms of any particular form at all. Jonas Mekas described it as such after the fact, I think because he was consciously working that form and saw some affinities, but that concept was never useful to me. I think what was really at work was my old fascination with “news,” in this case news of what I took to be heaven. The style and stance are there, hand-held and eye-level, steadfast and innocent of artifice and mortality—innocent, period. Trying to “record” that light storm of ghostly beauty blowing around me, doomed in the attempt as we always are. And ghosts they were and are: the people by now aged to unrecognizability, the animals dust long since, the rooms themselves demolished; the only remaining trace is a length of decaying plastic with a few inaccurate shadows, rapidly fading.17
Noren eloquently articulates the elegiac tone emanating from his own celebrations of the particulars of daily life. It is characteristic of the quotidian lyric as a whole. In fact, three of Mekas’s “diaries” are actually threnodies centering on footage of a recently dead friend: Notes for Jerome (1978), Scenes from the Life of Andy Warhol (1991), Zefiro Torna: Scenes from the Life of George Maciunas (1992).18 Warren Sonbert’s The Cup and the Lip (1986) includes images of his mother’s burial.
Peter Hutton:
When I made Lodz Symphony, I said to my Polish friends, “You know, this film is not going to make any sense to you now, but in ten or fifteen years you may well appreciate that someone actually recorded the atmosphere of this city at this particular time.”19
In a sense this genre is closely related to home movies. But home movies freed from their deadly conventions: historic landmarks, descriptive pans, a concentration on what is collectively considered important, the evasion of “unpleasant” events, automatically homogenized exposures. While the avant-garde quotidian lyric shares the home-movie maker’s recognition of the importance of place, of family celebrations, of capturing the look of people and things against the pressures of time, it is also particularly receptive to nuances of light intensity and to the articulation of mood through the film-maker’s manipulation of the time in which events are represented. Once Mekas recognized in his initial diaristic footage “that what was missing was myself …It affected my exposures, movements, the pacing, everything.”20 Voice-over commentary may be the most blatant method Mekas used to inscribe himself in his films.
However, the absence of a soundtrack (in Noren’s, Hutton’s, and most of Sonbert’s films) and the use of black and white (for Noren’s films since 1974 and all of Hutton’s) emphasizes the luminous, compositional, and temporal subtleties of the quotidian lyric. Crudely, if the home movie apes the habits and topoi of snapshots, the quotidian lyric finds cinematic equivalents to the compositions, moods, luminous densities, and textures of high art photography. The home movie’s conventions are particularly anesthetizing within the temporality of the shot, legislating a pacing that does not risk the “boredom” of long contemplation or the “incomprehension” of very fast editing. The quotidian lyric oscillates between the extremes of pixillated and time-lapse compression and the dilation of time in extended metonomies of landscape or close-up details. Hutton attributed the leisurely pace of his imagery to the training of his sensibility as a merchant seaman. Noren tends to sustain the contemplative tempo of Huge Pupils even into the time-lapse photography of his latest installment, Imaginary Light (1995). Once Sonbert found his mature style (Carriage Trade[1968–1972]), he maintained a relatively fast editing pace in all his films. Mekas, of course, continues to punctuate longer shots with the staccato intensity of single-frame bursts.
Noren calls his continuing serial film The Adventures of the Exquisite Corpse to conceptualize the function of chance in the internal organization of each part. They are not the result of a number of artists representing an imagined body without reference to each other’s work, as the original exquisite corpse of the Surrealists was. Rather, by building up the film following the order of shooting, the film-maker renders the intimate “news” as a sequence of fortuitous observations and elliptical perceptual acts. Not all quotidian lyrics follow this procedure, but they all prefer a paratactic linearity that suppresses or reduces thematic organization. Hutton stressed parataxis by titling an early work July ’71 in San Francisco, Living at Beach Street, Working at Canyon Cinema, Swimming in the Valley of the Moon (1971). Brakhage may be the most pervasive influence on the makers of quotidian lyrics but he has seldom made them himself—his minor Films by Stan Brakhage: An Avant-Garde Home Movie (1962) is an obvious exception—because of the dominance of thematic montage in his practice.
Noren’s best critic, Bruce Elder, sees his parataxis as a form of anaphora, which he illustrates by quoting Christopher Smart’s “Jubilate Agno,” an enthusiasm of Noren’s.21 But anaphora requires the systematic repetition of a semantic marker to indicate the commencement of each unit in the series—in Smart’s poem long series of lines beginning with “Let” or “For.” It is precisely the absence of such a marker that distinguishes the quotidian lyric. Yet again Mekas’s work has to be distinguished from the genre I am describing and which he has influenced. While never using dated entries, he has usually subdivided his films with intertitles or, in the central panel of Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania, numbered “glimpses.”
As the citations of Noren and Hutton reveal, the quotidian lyric emphasizes presence to evoke absence, crams the frame with vitality to connote mortality, and represents isolation and withdrawal with hyperboles of sociability, festivity, and civic pageants. The erotic candor of Noren’s Huge Pupils, in which the film-maker recorded himself in periodic acts of intercourse and oral sex, uncannily disrupts the identification of the camera eye with that of the viewer: the lubricious synecdoches insist that the eye through which we have been sharing the details of urban pleasure—a steaming mug of tea, sunlight on a floor, friends on a New York rooftop—has an inaccessible locus in the film-maker’s body; and more radically, the film-maker, in observing his own libidinous ecstasies, marks the poignancy of their ephemerality. For Elder the tension between the carnal representation and the aporia of tactility becomes the crux of Huge Pupils: “What Noren discovers …is that the pristine self hides even from intimate relations. He initially proposes that one discovers one’s self in intimate relations with others, then proceeds to bring that claim into doubt.”22
Contrary to Noren’s astute observation on the influence of Mekas’s practice on his critical thinking, Mekas himself is actually engaged less in keeping a film diary than in making an elaborately structured autobiography uniquely confined to events he has filmed rather than the full range of his memory. In a lecture on Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania, he discussed the substitutional rhetoric of his cinema:
[T]hings …kept coming back again and again. I thought each time I filmed something different. But it wasn’t so.… Like, for example, the snow. There is practically no snow in New York … When I started looking at my film diaries again, I noticed that they contained everything that New York didn’t have …In truth, I am filming my childhood, not New York. It’s a fantasy New York—fiction.23
Within each of his completed films the quotidian lyrics, “notes” and “sketches,” are examined, usually after a considerable passage of time, and restructured in an editing process that crucially deploys intertitles and voice-over, and the symbolical use of musical quotations, to support the autobiographical scaffolding.
Mekas’s enthusiasm for his contemporaries and his modesty and reticence about his own achievements as a film-maker contributed to the underestimation of his stature in the sixties and seventies. However, in the last twenty years his reputation has steadily grown, as he has completed film after film consistent with the project he initiated in the early 1960s. Congruent with the magnitude of his recording of the pulse of the New York art world for forty years is his slow revelation of the reflective self. By the nineties it was apparent that Mekas was one of the central filmmakers of the American avant-garde.
The intricate construction of Sonbert’s films obviates any representation of events in the order or pattern of their happening. Characteristically he brings together short shots from his extensive travels. Here is a fragment of his own shot list for Friendly Witness (1989), a film he edited to rock songs in a reprise of his earliest practice:
127 Girls back forth swing
128 Sam & postcards
129 Brief Taj Mahal
130 Mick Jagger walk
131 Brief bright Sphinx
132 Frank & Harvey on corner
133 Fiji sunsets
134 Dancing Morocco men
135 B&W plane curve
136 Little girl at desk writing24
Such global associationism so utterly denies the power of sequential time to write the meaning of daily events for the observing and filming self that the resistance to temporal succession itself looms large in the films. This pattern is even clearer when we see several Sonbert films in one screening; for he would return again and again to his ever-growing archive of recorded material to cull passages so similar to what he had previously used of a parade, portrait, train ride, etc., that it can be difficult to recognize the often minute differences in the representation of an event or site in different films. The teasing play of variation is at the heart of his aesthetic. Furthermore, thematic foci determine the selection of material and the principles of variation. Noblesse Oblige (1978–1981) explores the relationship of self to news reporting during the rioting that followed the murders of Mayor Moscone and Harvey Milk and the trial of Dan White. A Woman’s Touch (1983) takes on the film-maker’s fascination and identification with stylish women. Along with the return to a soundtrack, Friendly Witness tests the possibility of recovering the dithyrambic enthusiasm with which he first embraced a rhetoric of global montage and measures the wistfulness and nostalgias inherent in the twenty-some years since his previous sound film.
In 1980 Sonbert identified the themes of some of his films and even provided musical analogies:
Carriage Trade …is about travel, transportation, anthropological investigation: 4 continents, 4 organized religions, customs; about time with its 6 years in the making and cast of thousands; about how the same people age and grow and even change apartments over 6 years. Rude Awakening is about Western civilization and its work/activity ethic and the viability of performing functions and activities. Divided Loyalties is about art vs. industry and their various crossovers.… Noblesse Oblige is about journalism, reportage, news events that you might see on the 6 o’clock report, how the news is created, how it might effect our lives, and journalists’ responsibilities.…And I indeed regard the works in a Mozartian key scheme: Carriage Trade being E-flat Major, broad, epic, leisurely, maestoso; Rude Awakening in D minor, brooding, cynical, fatalistic, dancing on the precipice; Divided Loyalties in C Major, agile, dynamic, spry, with a hint of turbulence.25
Such hints from the film-maker should lead us to consider his films as works within the dominant genre pioneered by Brakhage: the crisis lyric. Nothing here suggests what I have been calling the quotidian film. In fact, Sonbert, in the same lecture, said; “The great hero i[n] film history is Stan Brakhage, who ‘liberated’ film. He made the tactile qualities the major concern and showed that ‘mistakes,’ errors could have an expressive, demonic, psychological function.”26
Yet Sonbert is both more tentative and more subtle in his articulation of themes than Brakhage. All of his films, from Carriage Trade on, share a distinctive framework. They are “world melodies” to adapt from Walter Ruttmann, whose Berlin —Die Symfonie der Grosstadt (1927) gave the name “city symphony” to a genre of film, after his Die Melodie der Welt (1929). Continually fusing images from different countries and cultures through a gridwork of images of motion—shot from vehicles, of vehicles, and on foot—that attest to his restless, insatiable hunger for images, he orchestrated the thematic thrust of individual films by association. It is easy to see these films as chapters in one open-ended work. He once said as much himself in conclusion to the observation on Mozartian key signatures: “and even this scheme of keys can be seen as a classical instrumental concerto: first movement [Carriage Trade] setting the scene and longest in time and investigation; the second movement [Rude Awakening] a dark melancholy adagio; the third [Divided Loyalties] a breezy rondo to clear if not quite dispel the heavy air, gracious, with a let’s-get-on-withlife feeling, a caper and a capper to what has gone before.”
City symphonies and world melodies are closely related to quotidian films. With a loosening of the thematic dominance characteristic of the “city symphonies” of the twenties which sought to portray urban rhythms from morning to night, the representation of the mood of a city or place is supplanted by the mood of the film-maker in that place. Nowhere is the reciprocal nature of these forms so clearly demonstrated as in the cinema of Peter Hutton, who has made films of most of the places he has lived or worked: San Francisco, New York, Boston, Budapest, Lodz, and the Hudson Valley. Hutton’s films are all silent, usually in black and white, slow paced, often with fades or black leader isolating shots. He measures his consciousness of what he sees by surprising himself:
Having the luxury to behold the simplest things can often be a revelation in itself, and it can be metaphorically transformed into meaning as well.… There’s …a fairly obvious quality to black and white, in terms of film history; it tends to take us back in time rather than project us forward. That also can be a bit of a reprieve for an audience, like being taken out of time and suspended in a space where there is no overt reference to daily experience.…My films are a way of subtly tweaking that [still photography’s] formal approach to beauty by allowing another language to come in: movement and transformation. On the other hand, there’s often an attempt to ‘stop time’ letting time be an overriding element that provides some small revelation about the image. Mine is an extremely reductive strategy.27
The contemplative pace of Hutton’s cinema owes something to structural film, which the film-maker has inherited not from the severe ironists, Snow, Frampton, or Landow, but through the mediation of the sensual approach of Bruce Baillie. Hutton himself acknowledges the influence of Asian teachers, from his adolescence in Hawaii and, above all, his experience as a merchant seaman: “I was nurtured on the tradition of the free spirit wandering around the world recording impressions.…You can actually go backwards in time on a ship, you can sail into a storm and make no headway … Being on a ship forced me to slow down, and allowed me to take time to look.”28
IN THE THREE FACES OF THE FILM (1960) Parker Tyler had collected some of his most important essays on avant-garde and modernist cinema, filmic myths and rituals, and cultural criticism under the rubrics “The Art: more or less fine,” “The Dream: more or less mythical,” and “The Cult: more or less refined.” These three categories dominate his crucial work on American avant-garde film in the fifties. At that time, inspired by the depth and seriousness of his criticism, I began to formulate the schemata underlying this book. My greatest resistance, however, was to the notion of the cult—of “the Big Experimental Film,” of “displaced laughter,” of “the direct imaging of the human face.” In retrospect I have to concede the astuteness and appropriateness of this category of Tyler’s analysis. The American avant-garde cinema has nourished itself on its cultic denial of the commercial cinema in general and it has renewed itself periodically through cultic devotions—to silent film, 8mm and Super-8mm projections, local aesthetics, collegial loyalties, confederacies of sexual preference, and so on.
Besides the enduring institutions dedicated to exhibiting avant-garde films, and the colleges and universities where they are regularly a part of the curriculum and attract an audience somewhat wider than the registered students, some informal and more intimate screenings have had a powerful influence, especially among film-makers and the most ardent viewers. In San Francisco, Nathaniel Dorsky has promoted a devotion to avant-garde cinema that included the reverential appreciation of a number of feature film-makers such as Hitchcock, Sirk, and Rossellini. Brakhage, sponsoring a weekly salon screening of a few films—sometimes his own, or those in the collection he amassed trading with his contemporaries, or those of visitors—, has nurtured a group almost exclusively focussed on the cultivation of avant-garde works. Saul Levine has made the classrooms and the screenings of the Massachusetts College of Art, in Boston, a meeting place for the larger community of local film-makers. The graduates and faculty of the film department of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago have serially spun off venues for showing their own and others’ work in that city.
Brakhage, Dorsky, and Levine are among the film-makers who exemplify a life devoted to the art of cinema to the ephebes drawn to their screenings and conversation. Dorsky had ceased to exhibit his films for nearly twenty years, but since the completion of his long quotidian lyric, Hours for Jerome, Parts 1 and 2 (1980–1982)—which alludes to the medieval books of hours in its title and follows a seasonal structure, recalling daily life with his companion, Jerome Hiler, in the late sixties—he has regularly released films that celebrate the textural properties of the celluloid image. Pneuma (1977–1983), a film of grain patterns reveals, in the film-maker’s catalogue description: “A world … that is alive with the organic deterioration of film itself, the essence of cinema in its before-image, preconceptual purity. The present twilight of reversal reality has made this collection a fond farewell to those short-lived but hardy emulsions.” 1 7 Reasons Why (1983) is a film of unslit 8mm images, four to each 16mm frame; in Alaya (1976–1987), sand patterns become metaphors for film grain.
A parallel to Dorsky’s passion for the beauty of filmic matter is Morgan Fischer’s autobiographical film, Standard Gauge (1984), similar to Frampton’s (nostalgia), in which we see in 16mm, snippets of 35mm film on an editing table, as Fisher wryly narrates the history of his labors in the penumbra of the Hollywood film industry and lovingly describes his contacts with the “standard gauge” of feature film-making with a self-parody of his cultic relationship to film.
Retrospectively, in the hard light of digital “special effects,” the optical printer has come to be a nearly archaic artisanal tool. In the hands of Pat O’Neill, Phil Solomon (who has recently become Brakhage’s collaborator when he requires optical printing of his hand-painted films), and Bill Brand, the optical printer has become a primary tool of filmic invention. Writing of Saugus Series (1974), to my mind O’Neill’s most exciting film, I described the impression his synthetic space gives us. It is consistent with that of his later, longer works, including Water and Power (1989):
By stressing the synthetic power of the optical printer, the filmmaker has undercut the option of seducing us into the landscape he has invented. Thus, despite any superficial resemblance to the fusion inherent in surrealist images, such as those of Magritte, these curious made-up spaces flash invisible do-not-enter signs; the fragments which are assembled within them put up resistance, carting their initial contexts along with them: they are problematic metonymies … O’Neill, a native of southern California, seems to be telling us that a symbolic and psychologically personalized landscape loses its significance in a place like Los Angeles which is so overwhelmed by fragmented representations and gerrybuilt perspectives.29
The central achievements of the graphic cinema in this period also reflect the tactility of the medium. Robert Breer’s films turned back from the minimalist sheen of his work in the early seventies to the playful drawing and coloring of his films of the early sixties. Lewis Klahr became the most prominent animator of the subsequent generation. His works are cutout collages, for the most part filmed in Super 8mm, that openly flaunt their direct, artisanal manipulation of images minutely budged from frame to frame. The masterpiece of this mode, Larry Jordan’s magisterial Sophie’s Place (1986), directly acknowledges the convergence of a religious, cultic site and what he calls his “alchemical autobiography”; for “Sophie’s Place” is the Byzantine interior of the Church of Hagia Sophia, which forms the backdrop for much of the phantasmagoria of unpremeditated collage juxtapositions as images float and collide in its immense nave.
In Circles of Confusion, Hollis Frampton describes four modes of composition for post-Symbolist art. One he called “constriction”: the reduction of a canon to a single author. His example was James Joyce: “the works from which he derived the laws that govern his writing were those of one author, Gustave Flaubert.” A similar case in the history of the American avant-garde cinema would be that of Robert Beavers; a parallel hyperbolic claim might be that he constricted the history of the cinema to the films of Gregory Markopoulos, whom Beavers met in 1965 and with whom he lived for the next twenty-seven years, until Markopoulos’s death.
In the mid-1970s Markopoulos withdrew his films from distribution and envisioned the ultimate cultic center, a pilgrimage site in rural Greece to be devoted solely to the cyclical screenings of his and Beavers’s films: The Temenos (literally “temple precinct”) where he hoped to build a theater and archive eventually. In the eighties, outdoor exhibitions were held annually on the site. The major work of Markopoulos’s last fifteen years was the re-editing of his entire corpus for screenings in the Temenos; he restructured his work into the more than one hundred cycles of Enaios, which would take more than eighty hours to show.
Beavers conceived of three cycles which would constitute his collected films, entitled My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure. The third cycle, when it is completed, will consist of nine films—the longest of them a half hour—made since 1975. Two are not yet completed: one on themes from Borromini’s architecture, another on paintings of Sassetta. The films of his third cycle dramatize the problematic status of the image by repeatedly interweaving gestures of signification—especially hand movements, glimpses of a natural theater in Salzburg, maintained in topiary shrubs, and allusions to vessels of storage. Having tacitly repudiated the mannerism and mythopoeia of Markopoulos’s cinema, Beavers divested his art of any appeal to a myth of originary experience and even to most references to extracinematic emotions. The consequent projection of noetic movement, as the coming into being and testing of perceptions, associations, and ideas, invests his work with lucid serenity. Under his persistent gaze the polished isolation of solid things and simple acts gives way to the picturing of a restless mind, repeatedly attempting and almost succeeding in defining the peculiar timbre of a place and finding the measure of his presence in it. The films themselves succeed so startlingly because the film-maker has so subtly comprehended the structural impossibility of absolutely coming to that definition. In Efpsychi (1983) he may be acknowledging the perpetually deferred teleological moment in this paradox by repeating the Greek word “telftia” [last things] on the soundtrack.
Phantasmagoria within the cultic center in Larry Jordan’s Sophie’s Place and the quotidian lyric: Peter Hutton’s New York Landscape, Part 1.
In its purity and conceptual rigor Beavers’s achievement is matched by that of Ernie Gehr. His very rapid evolution as a film artist entailed the radical divestment of almost all recoverable traces of an autobiographical or affective relationship to the visual field towards which he directed his camera. For, if in some of his first films the sentiment linking the image and the film-maker recalls Brakhage’s hyperpersonal gaze, neither the institutional corridor we see in Serene Velocity, nor the flowing New York traffic of Still, nor the isolated vehicles in Shift (1971–1974), nor the brick wall of the short untitled film of 1977, nor the Berlin streets of Signal—Germany on the Air (1982–1985) appear on the screen as privileged images or epiphanic moments. The film-maker maintains the type of cool and distant isolation from his nominal subjects that Warhol practiced, although by focussing on things and places rather than people (or by de-individualizing them by shooting from above or in grainy slow motion), Gehr’s films never suggest Warhol’s cruelty.
Robert Beavers’s Efpsychi. Copyright Robert Beavers, courtesy Temenos Archive.
For almost every film of his maturity Gehr has created a cinematographic strategy specific to his subject. For instance, in Eureka (1974) he rephotographed and thereby extended in slow motion a turn-of-thecentury film of San Francisco, shot from a moving cable car. This is the same technique he had used in monumentalizing a few shots of Andrew Noren and a girlfriend in Reverberation (1969, revised 1986). But in the later work the gesture is more hyperbolical (extending a five-minute film to thirty minutes), more monomorphic (there is only one shot), and more distanced from the film-maker (the original was made at least fifty years before he was born, rather than being a portrait of friends). The title comes from a sign on a vehicle in the film, but it is just as much the exclamation of an Archimedean insight into the origins and the nature of film itself. In fact, each of Gehr’s films has an implied exclamation of “I have discovered …” The direct object of that discovery in each is the fusion of a visual subject and a filmic technique that interact to create what he has called “an emoted idea.”
Shift brilliantly combines fragmentary compositions of a New York street, shot from high above, with a sound-effects track of street noises. Severe angles, reverse motion, sudden disappearances, and the imaginary “close-ups” suggested by the sounds demonstrate, for the first time, Gehr’s consummate craft as an editor, and his formal perfectionism. Untitled: Part One 1981 (revised 1986), Signal—Germany on the Air, and This Side of Paradise (1991) refract the film-maker’s identification with the displaced Jews of his parents’ generation. Again shooting down in the street, but not from the lofty height of Shift, he observes the movements, gestures, meetings, and crossings of elderly immigrants in the first film. The second and the third were shot in Berlin: Signal—Germany on the Air dwells on the sites of buildings prominent in the Third Reich, with a static camera, interrogating the undistinguished locations for unretrievable signs of the scandalous past; in the third film, he walks his camera through the Potsadamer Platz flea market in the last days of West Berlin, surveying the dingy wares Poles were offering for sale in a field of mud and reflective puddles.
Gehr linked his dazzling Side/Walk/Shuttle (1991) to his films of European displacement:
The initial inspiration for the film was an outdoor glass elevator and the visual, spatial and gravitational possibilities it presented me with. The work was also informed by an interest in panoramas, urban landscape, as well as the topography of San Francisco. Finally, the shape and character of the work was tempered by reflections on a lifetime of displacement, moving from place to place and haunted by recurring memories of other places I once passed through.30
In twenty-four sensuous long takes, Gehr’s camera rides up and down the exterior elevator, often panning as it glides. The transformation of the high-rise cityscape into a fluid antigravitational image conjures a disorienting, oneiric music from visions of the street emerging from the sky, or flowing sideways across the screen.
Gehr himself has written: “A shot has to do with a variable intensity of light, and internal balance of time dependent upon an intermittent movement and a movement within a given space dependent upon persistence of vision … [Film] does not reflect on life, it embodies the life of the mind. It is not a vehicle for ideas or portrayals of emotion outside of its own existence as emoted idea.”
The recognition that has come to Beavers, Dorsky, and Levine in the nineties after decades of obscurity and neglect is a significant index of the revitalization of the audience for the American avant-garde film. J Hoberman recently introduced a symposium with these comments on “Tracking the Resurgence of Experimental Film”:
Given the relative lack of critical attention, who could have predicted the audience that thronged the Whitney [Museum of American Art] for its mind-bogglingly comprehensive retrospective of American avant-garde cinema last fall, or the crowds that packed the Walter Reade [cinema of Lincoln Center for the Arts] last month for an evening of lyrical diary-films by Nathaniel Dorsky? Similarly, legendary underground figures like the protean Ken Jacobs and minimalist composer Tony Conrad are lionized by audiences born years after these men made their structuralist blockbusters.31
As important as any of the events Hoberman mentioned was the Museum of Modern Art’s two-year exhibition of small gauge (8mm, Super 8mm) films curated by Steve Anker and Jutta Jensen and shown weekly at a small screening room, often to overflowing audiences.32 That museum’s central venue for avant-garde cinema, the monthly Cineprobe series, has lasted thirty years. The Millennium Film Workshop has survived even longer. The San Francisco Cinematheque and Anthology Film Archives have shown similar resilience.
Thus, the evolution of the expansive Menippea was countered by the cultivation of the exquisite small film. As film-makers recognized the consequences of video and digital technology’s removal of the raw material from the domain of touch, the cutting and gluing of montage, scratching and painting on the celluloid surface, micro-adjustments of collage scraps, manual aligning of synchronization on the editing table, and the threading of projectors became rituals in the reaffirmation of the fundamental values of the filmic image. On a larger scale the veneration of the cinema’s unique illusions of movement and depth can be seen in Ken Jacobs’s three-dimensional projections—“the Nervous System”—with two homemade, variable speed machines. The thrall of what film can do lies at the heart of what I am calling, after Tyler, the cult of the avant-garde film.
